Acquisitions Mergers If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants That somewhat self-effacing quote comes from no less than Isaac Newton who some figure was a giant in his own right It also serves to sum up the state of the financial technology fintech market today including mobile payments A new report sent our way from Bottomline Technologies sums it up theres going to be a lot of shoulder-standing when it comes to the fintech sector The Bottomline Technologies study spelled it out just over three in every four banks 76 percent surveyed were planning to either use fintech solutions for payment-related services and solutions or were already doing so in specific customer niches Additionally corporations surveyed revealed they were using a non-bank provider for payments operations in 28 percent of cases and 32 percent planned to expand that in the next three years Real-time payments are increasingly prized with 55 percent planning to put these tools to work and Same-Day Automated Clearing House ACH tools come in at 44 percent Blockchain-based networks round out the top three at 35 percent Neither banks nor corporations are looking to put a lot of development into these systems though as both expect that application programming interfaces APIs will have the biggest overall impact on the payments space in the next two to three years However its likewise clear that these users are increasingly comfortable with mobile payments and similar technologies as the number of corporates reporting being comfortable increased 13 times over this time last year Its not that surprising that businesses are increasingly comfortable with mobile payments technologies After all were seeing these technologies used and used routinely on a regular basis Theres nothing like routine use to make it clear that something is safe for use and the scarcity of data breaches in the mobile payments sector does speak for itself quite well With so many advances already made in the field and a huge number of APIs already in play its not too surprising to see banks and other corporate figures toss over development plans of their own Why reinvent the wheel after all Its clear the shoulders of giants will soon see a lot more foot traffic